Russian Anti-Monopoly Body Analyzing Google, Yandex Own Products Promotion

Russia's Federal Anti-Monopoly Service (FAS) is looking into Google and Yandex technology companies to check whether they are using their search engines to promote their own products, Elena Zaeva, the head of the agency's Department for Regulation of Telecommunications and Information Technology, told Sputnik on Monday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) – In late June, the European Commission fined Google 2.42 billion euros (about $2.8 billion) for abusing its search engine's dominant position by unfairly promoting its own comparison shopping service. The company had to remedy the wrongful behavior within 90 days or be liable for penalty payment of up to 5 percent of the daily worldwide turnover of Google's parent company Alphabet. The Russian anti-monopoly agency has said it was looking into the European Commission's findings on Google.

"Undoubtedly, on our own initiative, we are studying how the search engine companies are behaving in Russia, whether they make preferential placements of their resources. This work is currently underway… We don't have the analysis of the share [of the market] ready, but there are probably two dominants, Yandex and Google… FAS is analyzing the behavior of the largest players of the search engine market," Zaeva said.

The FAS official noted that there had been no complaints similar to the one that prompted the European Commission to launch its case against Google.

"I cannot tell you anything about the timeline yet," Zaeva added.

In April, the FAS and Google ended their two-year long dispute over the US technology giant pre-installing its own applications on all Android devices sold in Russia, with Google agreeing to pay the fines and to refrain from restricting the installation of competitors' applications, including on the home screen in default position.

The FAS said in May that Google paid all of its fines, including the core 438 million rubles ($7.7 million) fine and additional penalties amounting to one million rubles.